Legislations By Stephanie Merritt Marie Agate Antonia Eckford

Health and Social Care Act 2008 This Act is very important to improve the care given to service users by health care services. It tries ensure that there is a minimum amount of health inequalities within the care sector as this enables the care givers to focus on the wellbeing of the service users they are working with and they will then be able to provide the best standard of care possible. The Care Quality Commission is a regulation which was created by this Act. The CQC has replace several regulations as they are all within the CQC instead of being several different legislations. They regulate lots of different service such as hospitals, clinics, dentists, care homes, doctors and service within homes. To ensure they are doing the best they can, they have principles in which they work by. The principles they use are: “put people who use services at the heart of our work. have an open and accessible culture. are independent, rigorous, fair and consistent. work in partnership across the health and social care system. are committed to being a high-performing organisation. promote equality, diversity and human rights.”

Care Standards Act 2000 This Act is very important in the health care sector. This Act gives all staff within the health care sector a standard of which they have to work to which is to ensure that the care being given is the best it can be. There is a national minimum standard of practice which all of the staff have to work to. This does not mean that they have to work to that standard, they should always aim to work to the best standard possible, however it is there so that a standard is always set and met. This Act also sets standards for social care so that all individuals that require social care will receive the care they need. As the staff can be working with vulnerable people such as children and adults, they have to have a thorough police check to ensure they are allowed and are suitable to be working with vulnerable people. This means that if they are not suitable, then they will not be able to work with them and the will be record that they are not allowed to work with vulnerable people.

Food Safety Act 1990 The Food Safety Act is enforced to ensure that all basic principles when handling and preparing food for others are met. This is to ensure that the food is safe to eat and is not contaminated and could make the people eating it ill. This is essential for all people to abide by when serving food to the public and large groups of people. This is followed in all care setting and the staff handling and preparing the food has to be aware of all the safety risks. It ensures all precautions are taken when preparing and servicing food to all individuals.

Food Safety (general food hygiene) Regulation 1995 This is put into practice by encouraging all individual to wash their hands thoroughly and then using hand sanitiser. Also plastic aprons are provided and should be changed when going to another service user. This ensures that anything that has gotten on it from the last service user will not be passed to the next service user.

References Stretch, Whitehouse (2010). Health & Social Care Level 3 Book 1. Essex: Pearson. Care Quality Commission (2013) “About us” [WWW] (13th October 2013)